An Everlasting Antiquity: Aspects of Peter Brownas the World Of Late Antiquity
Peter Brown’s influential book The World of Late Antiquity has had a formidable impact on ancient historiography. Before it, historians who studied the period leading to the deposition of Romolus Agustulus—the last Roman emperor—in 476 AD considered themselves ‘classicists’ or ‘ancient historians’, while those who studied the subsequent period called themselves medievalists; therefore before Brown’s book the collapse of the Roman Empire remained the watershed date that brought upon the Middle Ages. It is not the task of this essay to trace the history of this conception, but to examine the assertions, merits, and faults of Peter Brown’s book. Brown magnified, or more precisely, outright invented a new epoch: “[a number of elements] converged to produce that very distinctive period in European civilization—the Late Antique world” . Naturally, both the term nor the concept are not his: Late Antiquity had been commonly used to denote the last two centuries of the Roman empire, and the conspicuous socio-economic changes that it faced—from the debasement of the currency in the late 2nd century to the increasingly “mercenarization” of the Roman army and its progressive admittance of barbarian soldiers. Another prominent aspect of the Late Antique period—a complex aspect I shall examine—was the profound transformation of the arts around Diocletian’s time: from the ever-famous porphyry statue of the Tetrarchs, art displayed a new sensibility and indeed new preoccupations. ‘Late Antiquity’ was thus by no means a new concept. But what was new was Brown’s notion of a protracted Late Antique epoch, which though well-founded, he unduly stretched from 150 to 750 AD—dates I believe to be overextended in both directions—and which this paper shall examine.
